Christian Málaga-Chuquitaype
I am a structural engineer and applied dynamicist at the Department of Civil Engineering at Imperial College London, where I lead de departmental research in Structural Earthquake Engineering and direct the Emerging Structural Technologies Lab.
My work starts from a single premise: that the most efficient and resilient structures are those designed to move intelligently under extreme loading — rocking, dissipating energy through controlled mechanisms, attenuating seismic waves through engineered periodicity — rather than those that resist it by brute force. The governing question across all my research is whether the dynamic behaviour of such systems can be expressed in forms compact and general enough to hold across scales, configurations, and loading conditions, and used to design from first principles rather than merely to analyse or describe. That pursuit has produced foundational work on inerter-rocking systems, seismic demands in timber buildings, and emerging programmes on seismic metamaterials and low-gravity structural interventions.
My group is funded across EU, UKRI, British Council, and bilateral partnerships spanning Latin America, Turkey and Africa — a network that reflects the genuinely global distribution of seismic risk and a long-standing commitment to building engineering capacity in seismic-affected communities. Beyond Imperial, I serve as UK Deputy National Delegate to the International and European Associations for Earthquake Engineering and sit on BSI Eurocode committees for structural design.